LL. Have you been talking with my wife? The way you described it is why I can’t be upset at my wife for being upset and why I don’t think she is acting spoiled. I don’t agree with her view on renting, but understand the other stuff.
Well there are many reasons so much time has been spent, but here are but a few.
a little OCD on my part
we have a long list of criteria that we require for an ideal home and despite a large inventory in the market, many houses don’t come close to that criteria.
two people with “very” different tastes and needs in homes so you have to find a house that caters to both. (good luck!) To make it more interesting, we are giving our older kids and my dad, who will live with us, a say too.
we are very very picky to boot.
I view any price in my range as a lot of money and that makes me that much more nit-picky.
Unlike the last time when we bought a 5 year house we stayed in 8 so far, we are looking for a 20+ year house now. Many houses we have seen would have been great for 5 years , but we could not project them out further.
despite all of the above, we have found lots of houses that fit all our criteria, around a dozen, cuz that is about how many offers we wrote.
but after all that you still have to find a seller willing to sell you a house at the price you want to pay. In half the cases I more or less found such a seller, unfortunatley so did a bunch of other bidders willing to pay more than I was. In the other case I found sticky sellers sticking to above market prices that are hundreds of thousands of dollars above what I would pay. Those homes are all still on the market.
in the one case where I could have found “the house” I screwed up. You could be in a motorcycle race and be perfect for 99 laps and blink at the wrong time for a split second and boom, crash and burn.
unlike up here where you find 1 in 100 homes that fits your criteria and thus if the price is anywhere in your price range, you jump all over it, we found that SD had an embarrasment or riches of the type of homes we like, and that is not necessarly a good thing because it makes you not “jump” on the first house that you like. Sometimes too many choices lead to no choice at all. In NorCal you look at 100 homes to find the “one”, in SD you look at 100 homes to find the best of many “ones.”
This has been a learning process. Through all this searching we have refined our tastes as to what we like in a home and what we don’t like. Seeing that many houses has that inevitable effect. As those tastes have been refined, some homes became of greater interest and othes less.
Not knowing what particular part of RSF and surrounds is best for us left us looking in a pretty broad range of areas.
Our range is pretty broad and you can’t compare a $2M home to a $5M home, a fixer upper to a turn-key, so easily.
For all those reasons above and many others we ended up looking at a lot of homes. In part due to our experience to date, when we start looking again, we are considering limiting our search to Fairbanks Ranch only in the $3M-$4M market, as opposed to $2M-$5M. The reason for that is obvious from my previous posts.
P.S. We did not pick RSF just for school district. CV’s is as good or better, for example. We picked it because the type and size of house and type and size of lot and type of neighborhood that we want we find there more than other places. I like Del Mar west of 5 better than RSF, but we can’t find the size of house or lot that we want there, we did look several times for it. We rulled out La Jolla for different reasons and for similar reasons.
